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Which polls got it right?

2008-11-07 13:23:42

Thu Nov 6, 4:21 pm ET

Now that Barack Obama has officially won North Carolina and all of the electoral map is filled in (save Missouri, kind of), we were inclined to look at which of the pollsters and prognosticators called the election right.

First, we can look at Nate Silver, a new prognosticator to the political scene. The baseball statistician turned Electoral College map savant really was the belle of the election ball, living up to his website's tag line: Electoral projections done right.

While Silver never did any of his own polling, he analyzed all the pollsters' findings and spit out every voting model possible. Ultimately, he said Obama would win by 52 percent to 46 percent. In the end, Obama won 52 percent to 46 percent in the popular vote.

Silver's Electoral College map wasn't far off either. This graphic below, shows a comparison of what he projected vs. what actually happened. Unless I'm looking at this map wrong, the only thing they projected incorrectly was Indiana. (A note: Many news outlets have not called Missouri yet because it's so close. The latest numbers have McCain ahead by about 6,000 votes. If that's the ultimate outcome, Silver got that right too.)

The old stand-by pollsters didn't do badly either. A look at the Real Clear Politics poll average page tells us that almost everyone got Obama's number right. Gallup and Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby shot a little too high at 55 percent and 54 percent respectively. Fox News and Diageo/Hotline shot a little too low at 50 percent.

The whole group was collectively off a bit on McCain's numbers. The Real Clear Politics average put McCain's total at 44.5 percent, a point and a half under what he ultimately received.

Pew Research and Rasmussen Reports get gold stars though. They nailed both candidates' numbers.

In what many are considering the first true Internet election, pollsters and professional prognosticators weren't the only ones trying their hands at electoral map predictions. Tens of thousands of people created their own scenarios on the Yahoo! News Political Dashboard. If you consider Missouri as having gone to McCain, then 32 people of the thousands that created a scenario got the election right.